The crisis has been resolved, but this respite is temporary. We are bound to have more standoffs
and brinkmanship in the months and years ahead. For the tea party, the stakes could not be higher.
The movement is energized by a fear that soon America will be beyond rescue.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, put it plainly at the recent Values Voter Summit in Washington: “We’re
nearing the edge of a cliff, and our window to turn things around, my friends, I don’t think it is
long. I don’t think it’s 10 years. We have a couple of years to turn this country around or we go
off the cliff to oblivion.”

Cruz’s national approval rating may be an abysmal 14 percent, but to the base of the Republican
Party, he is an idol.

The current fear derives from Obamacare, but that is only the most recent cause for alarm.
Modern American conservatism was founded on a diet of despair. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr.
began the movement with a famous first editorial in
National Review declaring that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” House
Speaker John Boehner tries to tie into this tradition of opposition when he says in exasperation, “
The federal government has spent more than what it has brought in in 55 of the last 60 years!”

But what has been the result over these past 60 years? The United States has grown mightily,
destroyed the Soviet Union, spread capitalism across the globe and lifted its citizens to
astonishingly high standards of living and income. America has built highways and universities,
funded science and space research, and, along the way, ushered in the rise of the most productive
and powerful private sector the world has ever known.

At the end of the 1961 speech that launched his political career, Ronald Reagan said, “If I don’t
do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and
our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” But the menace Reagan
warned about, Medicare, was enacted. It has provided security to the elderly. There have been
problems regarding cost, but that’s hardly the same as killing freedom.

For most Americans, even most conservatives, yesterday’s deepest causes are often quietly
forgotten. Consider that by Reagan’s definition, all other industrial democracies are tyrannies.
Yet every year, the right-wing Heritage Foundation ranks several of these countries, such as
Switzerland, as more “free” than the United States, despite the fact that they have universal
health care.

For many conservatives, the “rot” to be excoriated is not about economics and health care but
about culture. A persistent theme of conservative intellectuals and commentators is the cultural
decay of the country.

But compared with almost any period in U.S. history, we live in bourgeois times, in a culture
that values family, religion, work and, above all, business. Young people today aspire to become
Mark Zuckerberg. They quote the aphorisms of Warren Buffett and read the Twitter feed of Bill
Gates. Even after the worst recession since the Great Depression, there are no obvious radicals,
anarchists, Black Panthers or other revolutionary movements — except for the tea party.

Over the past six decades, conservatism’s language of decay, despair and decline have created a
powerful group of Americans who believe fervently in this dark narrative and are determined to stop
the country from plunging into imminent oblivion. They aren’t going to give up just yet.

The era of crises could end, but only when this group of conservatives makes its peace with
today’s America. They are misty-eyed in their devotion to a distant republic of myth and memory,
yet passionate in their dislike of the messy, multiracial, quasi-capitalist democracy that has been
around for half a century, a fifth of our country’s history.

At some point, will they come to recognize that you cannot love America in theory and hate it in
fact?